Human Rights at Home and Abroad: Past, Present, and Future

who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which
may not be delegated to another with impunity. (p. 181-182)
Since this is the most detailed of the guidelines created in this code, the main importance is to protect the
subject‘s human rights, not to neglect or abuse them. The majority of the code does contain information
about technicalities of the subject‘s health and well being. This Code states that the test subjects must
consent to every part of the experiment, so the test subjects in the experiment are completely voluntary
and not forced into anything they are not comfortable with. Since the Nuremberg Trials, most people
assume that human test subjects are protected, which they are not. Test subjects can have privacy rights
broken, cannot be fully informed of the full experiment and its intentions, and can be manipulated in
participating in experiments that they did not originally volunteer to participate in, which are violating a
human‘s rights. These Codes are designed to specify important aspects to make sure that the Nuremberg
Code will prevent past issues and abuses of human experimentation.
The Nuremberg Code contains many important aspects to protect the test subject with their
consent of the experiment, and also requires the actual experiment to have a legitimate outcome that
benefits science or medicine. Human testing can be beneficial to society‘s health because the experiments
that are conducted can reveal valuable information about the human body. Where would society be
without chemotherapy for cancer patients? How would individuals survive without the vaccines that are
provided to promote immune health? All these questions and many more can be answered by human
testing. From this testing, the human race can benefit medically and can further advance studies that may
result in cures. Besides advancing medically, society can get a better understanding of the body through
human testing. They can be aware of the experiments that are being conducted to also improve their
lifestyle. For example, a growing problem in today‘s society is obesity, and through human testing,
researchers can gather data for diet and exercise plans that can benefit the population. If human testing is
less controversial it will lead to more scientific and medical curiosities. These curiosities will continue as
a domino effect once more research is found, resulting in more efficient experiments to better society‘s
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